Suntaste

Rannvá Holm Mortensen
Translated by Matthew Landrum

March 2023, 9 3/4 x 12 1/2”
112 pages
$30 paperback
ISBN 978-1-7366902-7-7

This is the first in a series of Faroese literature in translation by IPI Press. Future editions will include a short story anthology and collections of ballads–the sung oral tradition.

Rannvá Holm Mortensen works in the colors of the Faroe Islands: reds, grays, black, white, and sometimes terra cotta, flesh. Her prints, collages, woodcuts and handwritten poems—dreamscapes and nightmares—are illuminated in this reproduction of her original artists book.

Nature, earth mother, lifeblood of sea creatures, saltwater in our arteries, dendrites and seaweed-shaped shape-shifters. As you read, the female body dissolves into nature. One feels porous and pulsating. There is a cry, a plea at the core of the work—tidal longing. One hears the cavernous echoes of Frida Kahlo’s physical and emotional howls, and, as in T.S. Eliot ‘s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the phylogeny of human existence recapitulating the ontology of being. One fish, one child, one woman at a time.

It’s a woman’s world, bloody, ventricular.